Metropolis - May 2011

WADE

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Circle 112

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MASH-UP IN THE HILLS continued from page 122

penthouse, she describes how it was before— “You had to crawl through this little well to go up to get a view”—a problem the stair fixed. But Steely realized that when he walked up he’d see a television tower in the distance, a view that was about to be covered by more of this redwood wall. “So he added a long, skinny window just for the TV tower,” Wang says. “And now every time we walk up we see this beautiful tower, and it’s really wonderful.”

That’s what happens when an architect is willing to relinquish some control in the service of truly trying to give his clients a formal—concrete, one could even say—translation of their social and personal desires.

It sounds like a too-good-to-be-true story, this tale of a couple who received a little bit of an inheritance, bought a falling-apart house, looked for an architect to help fix it up, found one because their real-estate agent happened to know of an architect’s house just a few blocks away, and then happened to engage in a full-on creative mash-up. But that’s what happens when an architect is willing to relinquish some control in the service of truly trying to give his clients a formal—concrete, one could even say—translation of their social and personal desires. Many architects pay lip service to the idea of collaboration, but Steely not only talked the talk; he was willing to share the hammer. It’s an attitude that Martin and Wang noticed and appreciated. “To my eye, this is a golden age for architecture,” Martin says. “And Craig—he thinks in a very different way from most people.” Part of that thinking is this focus on the connection that got them all there. “With architecture, the process usually gets forgotten, and there are photos at the end, and that’s all that gets projected,” Steely says. “But I love how this project was the process. And they’re living in it as a process.”